By Leah Crane THE spikes keep things quiet. Too much noise and the antenna pointing out the top couldn’t hear the signals it needs to peer through the frigid exteriors of Jupiter’s moons. This is a model of the Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) instrument. If all goes well, RIME will start studying Ganymede, Europa and Callisto in 2029 as part of the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, also called Juice. The scaled-down 1:18 model seen here sits in an anechoic chamber in the Netherlands for a test of a test: before Juice is launched in ..read more

By Jonathan O'Callaghan EXPECT a sharp frost on Pluto for the next 100 years. That is the forecast from an analysis suggesting the dwarf planet’s atmosphere has reached maximum pressure and will begin freezing nitrogen onto the surface. Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere was first spotted in 1985 as astronomers watched the world pass in front of a distant star, an event known as an occultation. Since then, about a dozen occultations have been used to study its gassy layer, which has gradually grown in size over the past 30 years. The cause of this increase is the slowly changing seasons on ..read more

Live, die, repeat: foul-mouthed but endearing Nadia (Natasha Lyonne)Russian Doll/Courtesy of Netflix By Chelsea WhyteRussian Doll, streaming on Netflix THE latest hit on Netflix turns out to be a magic trick in eight parts. As Russian Doll begins, everything looks fairly ordinary for a TV drama – a party, a woman floundering in her mid-30s, death – then, with a single twist, it becomes extraordinary. This dark comedy stars Natasha Lyonne as Nadia, a foul-mouthed New Yorker who we soon learn is stuck in a time loop, repeatedly living through the night of her 36th birthday. She dies, only ..read more

By Daniel Cossins TO SEE how it all began, you have to go to the end of the Earth – a kilometre from the Amundsen-Scott station at the South Pole, to be precise. There, huddled against the great white wilderness, a telescope captures light from near-enough the beginning of time, interrogating it for answers to the oldest question of all: how the cosmos came to be. One of the most famous answers says that the universe had a stupendous growth spurt in its first moments, expanding almost as much in a split second as it would in the following 13.8 billion years. It is quite a claim. A few years ag ..read more

Earth-Moon-Earth plays Beethoven reflected back from the moona place that only exists in moonlight, Katie Paterson & J M W Turner, at Turner Contemporary By Boyd TonkinA Place That Exists Only in Moonlight: Katie Paterson & J. M. W. Turner Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK,to 6 May 2019 WHAT colour is the universe? Right now, according to Scottish artist Katie Paterson, it is beige; astronomers from Johns Hopkins University call it “cosmic latte”. Paterson’s new work enlists astrophysical research to present the ever-changing spectrum of cosmic events over billions of years in the form ..read more

By Daniel Cossins YOU may have heard that physics is in crisis. We were told that it would reveal the secrets to the origin of the universe and the fundamental nature of reality. Stephen Hawking even told us that it would “show us the mind of God“. But the big discoveries have dried up. Yes, we found the Higgs boson and detected gravitational waves, but they were predicted decades ago. None of the really ambitious ideas from the past 30 years or so have come good. So, what’s going on? To find out, I have come to the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, a facility dedicated to forging – as ..read more

The CHIME radio telescope is listening out for strange signalsAndre Renard/Dunlap Institute/CHIME By Chelsea WhyteFAST radio bursts (FRBs) are mysterious, milliseconds-long showers of radio waves that come from unidentified objects outside our galaxy. About 60 FRBs have been identified to date, the strangest being a lone, repeating source. Now, it is no longer alone. In August 2018, researchers at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a radio telescope in British Columbia, detected 13 more FRBs to add to the catalogue. One of them is the second FRB ever seen to repeat (Na ..read more

Video credit: Enrico Sacchetti and Riccardo Poggi Read more: World’s most powerful telescope takes us to the edge of a black hole ..read more

The mountaintop of Cerro Paranal in the Atacama desert was blasted away to create a level site for the Very Large TelescopeEnrico Sacchetti By Daniel CossinsANTU, Kueyen, Melipal, Yepun. These four hulking figures dominate the summit of Cerro Paranal, a rust-red mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Their home is among the most inhospitable places on Earth – a desolate, dusty terrain reminiscent of the surface of Mars. As night falls, the giants slowly rotate and stir into life. Doors slide open, and within the structures vast mirrors begin to capture light from distant corners of the universe ..read more

The universe will eventually come to an end, but will it be with a bang, a whimper, or something else? Astrophysicist Geraint Lewis has the answer ..read more